


a sign of strength

by OceanMyth



Series: Ocean's ATLA Drabbles, Oneshots, and Ficlets [9]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Gaang Cuddles, I let Toph say fuck, Oneshot, Set between seasons 2 & 3, There is cursing, Toph understands people through their heartbeats, and now she won’t stop, except not Aang because he’s in a coma, he’d be upset to know that he’s missing prime Cuddle Hours™, it’s more than just lying, these children are touch-starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:33:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26325694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OceanMyth/pseuds/OceanMyth
Summary: During the wait for him to wake up after Azula’s lightning strike, Toph discovers Aang is bald, and hastattoos;. (and the brief 30 seconds after this discovery where she considers him a badass)or: Toph muses on the meaning of strength.
Relationships: Aang & Toph Beifong, Aang/Katara (implied), I mean I'm gonna do everything but hit you over the head with it, Toph Beifong & Katara, Toph Beifong & Sokka, implied Toph/Sokka? Maybe? could be read that way, when I say implied Kataang
Series: Ocean's ATLA Drabbles, Oneshots, and Ficlets [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2113209
Comments: 13
Kudos: 149





	a sign of strength

**Author's Note:**

> This is shamelessly self-indulgent. Enjoy.

The night air is cool, as it ruffles through Toph’s hair. It’s nice to be on a ship for once, especially one made of metal, rather than in the air. She has to focus on the things that are nice, because she can feel Katara’s heartbeat dancing like a rabaroo next to Aang’s, his normal fluttery and energetic heartbeat turned faint and slow, floors below her. She’d picked out this spot on deck to make her own, because anywhere else and Aang’s heartbeat would have disappeared completely.

The first time she’d noticed his heartbeat disappear, she’d sprinted down the cold metal hallways, steps clanging and denting the metal under her pounding feet, skidding to a stop in the open doorway of Aang’s room. Katara had startled, and Toph had felt the coolness of water splash over the metal floor as Katara lost her grip on the water she was using to heal Aang. Toph had apologized, and backed out of the room, before Katara could start yelling at her. Again.

Sweetness has been  _ very  _ bitchy lately, and Toph can’t figure out whether it’s the tension building between her and her father, or the endless wait for Aang to wake up. Either way, Toph has found herself sticking to the area around Aang’s room since the incident, patrolling the narrow band of ship where she could still feel his heart beating like a caged tigerdillo.

The dents from Toph’s frantic footsteps are still in the hallway in front of Aang’s room. 

She hasn’t bothered to go back and fix them.

Toph notices Sokka is coming over to sit next to her, feet tip-tapping across the deck, to collapse in a huff, back to the railing of the ship. He’s a mockery of relaxation, limbs carefully arranged to seem careless, muscles tight, yet sprawled out like he’s got something to prove. 

Katara’s coming up the stairs, from her vigil next to Aang’s bed, and Toph’s glad that she’s taking a break. She’ll wear herself out if she tries to keep going the way she has, pouring every drop of energy she has into Aang, whose fate rests in the hands of only the spirits now, not hers. But Toph is not cruel enough to tell her that— not yet at least, Katara is doing a mostly okay job at taking care of herself too—so she lets Katara continue in her charade. 

Toph and Sokka sit in silence for a while, Toph waiting for Katara, Sokka— probably just brooding or something. When Katara joins them, she slumps to the ground with a quiet sigh, and doesn’t protest at all when Sokka draps an arm around her to pull her into a quick hug. Her heart hasn’t slowed down at all, despite her outer relaxation. Instead it has sped up quite a bit, as it did every time Aang was out of her sight. 

Toph knows that Katara has spent every waking moment since Azula’s attack with Aang, and she knows that Katara can’t sleep without him in the room anymore, waking up in a panic if she cannot hear his breathing. She knows about Katara’s late night healing sessions, which end with tears and unanswered prayers. But these are secrets that are kept between her and the metal of the former-Fire Nation ship, so she says nothing about Katara’s speeding pulse, and punches her friend gently in the arm.

Katara is the one who breaks their silence.

“Aang’s hair is coming back,” she whispers.

And Toph would focus on the soft and heartbroken way she said it—except what did she  _ mean _ , when she said his hair was  _ coming back _ ? Didn’t everyone have hair? Toph didn’t bother much with hers, just tried to keep it out of her way, but her mother had always enjoyed brushing it. Toph had enjoyed her mother brushing her hair too, when she was little, but it had slowly felt less and less like something a mother would do for her daughter, and more and more like something an owner would do for a pampered poodle-monkey. 

She didn’t let her mother brush her hair anymore. 

_ Anyway _ — Toph was pretty sure that everyone had hair, so what had happened to Aang that caused him to lose his? She decides to ask, hoping that the story will be something embarrassing, that she can hold over his head later—after he woke up—though if that were the case, how would they have managed to hide it from her? It would have had to be something that happened while they were on the road... Toph’s stomach twists as she contemplates the idea that her friends had been hiding something from her. She’d better ask before jumping to any conclusions though.

“Wait—what do you mean? Twinkle-toes doesn’t have any hair?” The gasp of shock that Sokka makes is both extremely exaggerated, and extremely unnecessary. He smacks his hand against his forehead dramatically, and Toph rolls her eyes, though he might not be able to see it. Her bangs are brushing against her cheeks in front of her eyes again, and she knows that sighted people have a hard time reading the particular combination of muscles moving, heartbeat fluttering, and weight shifting that conveys the rest of her feelings about Sokka’s display.

“I can’t believe I forgot—you’ve never seen Aang!” he exclaims, and Toph elbows him hard in irritation. Katara snorts, and Toph knows that she’s rolling her own eyes. The two share an almost-look of annoyance, except Toph knows that she’s probably not looking perfectly into Katara’s eyes. Sokka turns to her, and the way he tightens up his shoulders and thrusts his chest forward. He probably thinks he’s about to dispense great wisdom or some shit like that. 

“My dearest friend Toph, it is my great pleasure, my deepest honor, my- I don’t know where I’m going with this anymore, so I’m just gonna move on- to reveal to you, that our friend, the illustrious, the glorious, Avatar Aang, is completely bald. Hairless. Like a little baby. Has been since we’ve known him,” he says, and Toph is  _ still really confused _ , but then Katara socks her brother in the arm, and Toph is kinda impressed at the amount of noise that echoes off the metal deck, and the vibrations the ripple from Sokka. 

Katara’s punch must have  _ hurt. _

“What Sokka’s trying to say, is that the Air Nomads shave their heads. It’s probably so that their arrows aren’t covered up,” Katara explains, while Sokka rubs his arm, and that makes _a lot_ more sense, but Toph still has questions. Like, _what arrows?_ Did Aang paint his head or something? Did it wash off when Katara healed him with her magic water? Had Katara been repainting his head for him, while he was asleep? Because if she had, Toph might need to go barf over the side of the boat— that was way too disgustingly sappy and cute for her to deal with. Toph narrows her eyes. She needs answers.  
  
“Speaking of arrows,” Sokka drawls, then his heartbeat picks up then, and he asks excitedly, “Well? What color is it?” Katara scoffs.

“His hair isn’t blue where his arrow is, Sokka. It’s all just a normal shade of black.” 

Toph can feel Katara’s blush when she talks about the shade of Aang’s hair, and she shudders. She’s far more interested in the implication in Katara’s words, the way she practically shouts the words ‘ you absolute  _ fucking  _ dumbass’ at the end. Toph has always been mildly jealous of Katara’s ability to call Sokka a dumbass without actually needing to use the words. Maybe it’s a sibling thing. Hang on though… Sokka wasn’t dumb enough to think that Aang’s hair would be blue where it grew through paint—what was going on?

Toph decides that she’s had enough.

“Would  _ someone _ please explain to me what  _ the fuck _ is going on?!” she yells, and Katara and Sokka both scramble away from her— not very far, they all need the reassurance that physical contact provides—wincing at the attack on their eardrums. Sokka twitches slightly, before starting to explain.

“Aang has tattoos. Apparently it’s an ancient Air Nomad tradition that marks a master-” he keeps talking, but Toph tunes him out, checking her ears for pebbles. 

She couldn’t have heard that right. Twinkletoes? Having a single tattoo, let alone more than one? Not very likely— Toph recalls a conversation she’d overhead once, between two of the guards stationed in the garden. The older one, Quan, had been talking about getting a tattoo, then the younger one— she hadn’t known his name, he’d been a newer recruit, and she’d left before getting the chance to learn it— had interrupted, adamantly proclaiming that  _ he’d  _ never get a tattoo, that they hurt far too much. So the idea of Aang, soft as he was, getting a tattoo was pretty laughable to her.

She tunes back in to listen to the end of Sokka’s little speech “-anyway, he’s got these arrows tattooed from the top of his head, down his back and arms, all the way down to his feet. It’s pretty badass looking, actually.” Sokka trails off into silence for a moment, before turning to Katara.

“Should  _ I  _ get a tattoo?” Katara sighs, and rubs the bridge of her nose.

“No, Sokka. You should not get a tattoo.”

Toph interrupts. “Hang on—you’re telling me that  _ Aang _ has tattoos. And not only does he have tattoos, he has  _ full body _ tattoos that go all the way from his forehead to his feet.” Neither of them had been lying, but the idea is too ridiculous for her to take seriously. At least, at first. Then she thinks about it some more— there isn’t much to do these days,  _ but _ think— and she figures it out.

Just because his strength is quiet, doesn’t mean it’s not there. 

She’s been discovering, during these quiet and morose days, that there are a lot more types of strength than just her rough and tough kind. And Aang’s quiet, invisible kind fit right into what she knew about him, just like Katara’s fierce, protective love— love that you could drown in, if you weren’t too careful— and what Sokka kept hidden in the depths behind his brash posturing. It might not be traditional, but it was there, unwavering and steady.

Maybe that’s the kind of strength they need right now.

“Yeah.” Katara answers her eventually, and the lighthearted energy— well, it wasn’t quite lighthearted, but it was a fuck-ton better than the normal gloom—vanishes with her tone.

“He normally keeps his head shaved — like I said before. But his hair has started to grow out again… I don’t know if I should shave it for him, or let it grow out— it feels like a breach of his privacy either way. I just know that he’d hate having hair, and I feel— I never asked about it before. I don’t know what to do,” she says, and Toph knows that Katara is close to breaking.

Toph cracks her knuckles together. She’s pretty good at holding things together, stopping them from breaking, if she does say so herself.

“So. This arrow’s pretty fucking huge, right? Comes right over his forehead and everything?” Katara nods silently. Toph leans back, and closes her eyes. “Seems to me like the smart thing to do would be to let his hair grow out then. It’ll make it easier to keep him from being recognized, if we get boarded.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks, Toph.” Katara takes a deep breath, and Toph notices her heartbeat has sped up again, and she’s fidgeting anxiously. 

“I should go and check on Aang.” She leaves without another word, and Toph slides into the space she’d left next to Sokka, who wordlessly wraps an arm around her as they watch Katara disappear into the depths of the ship.

Toph goes back to listening to Aang’s faint heartbeat, floors below them.

It seems a little stronger than before.


End file.
